Sleater-Kinney, Decemberists look to add to their legacies

On “The Singer Addresses His Audience,” the opening song on the Decemberists' new album, Colin Meloy, the band's singer, addresses his audience: “We know you threw your arms around us/In the hopes we wouldn't change/But we had to change some.”

The Decemberists, terminally polite avatars of grown-up drama-class kids, mean for this sentiment to land like a fearless truth bomb, what lawyers would call a statement against interest. It's meant to raise provocative questions, and mostly it does: What does a band owe its audience? When a band dramatically changes its sound, does it breach some unwritten code? Do newly reunited bands, which traffic in nostalgia virtually by definition, have a special obligation to sound like they always did?

The Decemberists don't directly answer any of these questions on their new disc, “What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World.” It sounds a lot like the old Decemberists, only slightly milder and with a just-visible sense of self-loathing, which may be an answer in itself. Two other vintage indie bands also dropped new albums this week that indirectly grapple with the same issues: the trailblazing Sleater-Kinney's “No Cities to Love,” their first album in 10 years; and Scottish pop band Belle and Sebastian's career rebooting “Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance,” their first since 2010.

We've broken each one down to its fundamentals:

Sleater-Kinney, “No Cities to Love”

The story so far: Sleater-Kinney helped steer the riot grrrl movement, were considered the best band in the world by every single teenager who would ever go on to write for a music blog and went on hiatus after 2005's “The Woods” without a bad album to their name. They had no successors. After an off-season in which singer-guitarist Carrie Brownstein co-created and starred in “Portlandia,” they've issued a surprise reunion LP.

The new album: “Cities” hits like a tidal wave. It's a tangle of hooky, sound-alike punk songs with its own inexorable momentum. It's a fire-and-brimstone examination of economic and gender inequality, motherhood and friendship. It's both flinty and warm, nostalgic and effortlessly contemporary. But mostly it's an album for the already converted. If you think they're the best punk rock band that ever was, there's nothing here that will change your mind. If you think they're an overrated power trio whose occasional lyrical lunkheadedness is unjustly overlooked, there's also nothing here that will change your mind.

High points: Janet Weiss is as blazingly good as any drummer on Earth. Opener “Price Tag,” scrappy and succinct, channels Barbara Ehrenreich. Singer Corin Tucker sounds eerily like Geddy Lee.

Low points: Singer Corin Tucker sounds eerily like Geddy Lee. And the album's back half can seem like a repetitive slog.

Belle and Sebastian, “Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance”

The story so far: After years of releasing quietly melancholy pop albums to diminishing returns, the beloved Scottish twee merchants have been on and off hiatus since the mid-2000s. After a four-year break (during which singer Stuart Murdoch wrote and directed the film “God Help the Girl”), they reunited for what is being touted as a career-redefining dance-pop release.

The new album: It's a sometimes uneasy mix of the group's usual lush orchestral folk and tentative, synth-y disco, with too much emphasis on the former. “Girls” is meant to evoke the Pet Shop Boys or the sleek retro funk of Daft Punk and would be a far better offering if it did. But it clings to the group's genteel past by its fingernails.

High points: There are lovely chamber-like pieces (“The Cat With the Cream”) and loping odes to '60s pop (“Ever Had a Little Faith?”).

Low points: Murdoch, as is his wont, wrote many of these songs from the point of view of a young adult, in this case a girl named Allie, who worries about world events (“When there's bombs in the Middle East/You want to hurt yourself”) and muses unconvincingly about the procedural intricacies of the British Parliament.

The Decemberists, “What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World”

The story so far: After the release of their last album, 2011's Billboard-topping “The King is Dead,” the Decemberists went on hiatus. In the interim, Meloy authored a series of successful children's books with his wife, artist Carson Ellis.

The new album: The Decemberists have always been one rollicking sea chantey away from self-parody, but their new album tamps down their most whimsical impulses. It's an atypically internal, often sedate collection of country-squire folk songs, some reed-thin, others tastefully upholstered. Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake are used as obvious reference points.

High points: “12/17/12,” named for the date of President Barack Obama's post-Newtown address to the nation, is impossibly graceful and viscerally sad.

Low points: “Anti-Summersong” appears to examine Meloy's ambivalence about life as a pop singer (“I'm not going on/Just to sing another summer song/So long, farewell”) in ways sure to make his fellow Decemberists nervous about their job security. Likely alternate title: “I Wouldn't Still Be Doing This If I Didn't Have a Mortgage.”